Page 26 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

16 Kelly Oliver

only "paradigmatic of the fear haunting many Hitchcock films" but also
12
"the quintessential horror film," In her commentary on Frenzy Modleski
uses Julia Kristevas theory of abjection to formulate a connection between
women and impure animals; discussing the scene in which the serial rapist
and murderer Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) returns to the corpse of one of his
victims, whom he has stuffed into a potato sack, Modleski says that "the
feeling is very much one of violating an ultimate taboo, of being placed
in close contact with the most 'impure' of 'impure animals': the carcass
of the decaying female." 13 Modleski invokes Kristevas analysis of phobia
in Powers of Horror, in which Kristeva identifies the source of all pho-
bia, particularly dietary prohibitions against eating certain animals and
fear of contamination by carcasses of impure animals, with the mother,
whose body is made abject by the male child and by patriarchal culture
generally. 14
In Powers of Horror Kristeva proposes that within patriarchal culture
the mother's body and her authority must be contained. Kristeva main-
tains that various rituals, particularly religious rituals, serve that function.
The threat of the maternal body is one of abjection or contamination that
threatens the very identity of the child, especially the male child, who must
distinguish his identity from the maternal / female. Kristeva defines the
abject as what calls into question boundaries; the abject, then, is anything
that threatens identity. On the level of individual development, the infant's
own identity is threatened by its identification with its mother. It must
"abject" its mother, turn away from her, to become an individual. On the
level of social development, families, groups, and nations are also defined
against what has been made abject or jettisoned from the group's identity,
which are parts of itself that it imagines as unclean or impure. On both
levels the figure that poses the greatest threat to identity is the maternal
body or the female body insofar as it conjures maternity. This is because we
were all once part ofthat body; and on both the individual and social levels
we continue to struggle to distinguish ourselves from it, especially insofar
as the maternal is associated with the natural and the animal.
Certainly, Kristevas analysis seems to fit Norman Bates, who cannot
distinguish himself from his mother and as a result finds his own sexual
desires and their objects abject and therefore becomes abject himself. The
film forces the viewer to identify with Norman, thereby challenging the
viewer's identity and putting him or her into the position of the abject
as well as the position of one abjecting both the mother and Norman's